We've all been there: you're in the middle of a gig, and someone asks you if you can do something "like the classic winamp / milkdrop / geiss visualizer thing". For a lot of people, visualizers bundled with MP3 players were their first exposure to music visualization, and that's had an important and lasting influence on what we all do.

Recently we were feeling nostalgic, and upon realizing that there wasn't a good way to pipe these visuals into more general-purpose VJ apps like VMDX, we decided to build something that did. Fortunately, this was pretty easy- in large part because we were able to make use of a nice open-source library called "projectM", which is an OpenGL-based re-implementation of the class MilkDrop engine.

We probably won't be adding projectM support directly into VDMX for a number of reasons; however a simple cocoa app that can publish its video output via Syphon seemed to us like something that lot of people might enjoy using- so we're happy to introduce ProjectMilkSyphon, a free projectM-based visualizer that can be used with any app that supports Syphon.

ProjectMilkSyphon can be used to create sound reactive visuals from an audio input to your computer such as a built-in microphone or line in and mixed into your favorite VJ apps over Syphon.

From the settings panel in ProjectMilkSyphon you can adjust the following options:

Also we need to give a huge thanks to the projectM community for doing all the years of hard work that are behind this project and for generously making available under the terms of the LGPL so that we could create this tool for you.